Both flourish as the state fails to deliver services. They are imperfect alternatives with poor outcomes.

Career Plan Coaching Centre is not much to look at. It is a tiny room, tightly packed with benches and desks, housed in an unplastered brick structure, one half of which is a garage.

A board advertises the services offered by the centre, located in Geetwas, a small village near Araria in northeastern Bihar: tuitions for students between class 8 and class 12.

But, as Gautam Kumar, a mathematics graduate in his mid-twenties who runs the centre, explains, he does not merely provide supplementary education to students lagging in one or two subjects – he teaches the entire school curriculum.

Career Plan is a homegrown response to the larger crisis of public school education in Bihar.

Said Owais Alam, whose son studies under Kumar: “We send our children to these places because there is no teaching in government schools.”

The government school at Geetwas is unable to teach well because of the usual reasons. The school should have 15 teachers but have just nine, said a senior official at the school. Even these nine get pulled into government work – election duty, for instance – which eats into teaching time.

Last year, the government asked the school for information about its students – their names, bank account numbers, the number of days they were present, their parents’ names, about 30 fields of data. The nine teachers, working together, took 15 days to put the information together.

Such demands come at least three or four times a year, the official complained. The school loses as many as 45-60 days of teaching each year. “About 25% of the syllabus gets left out,” he said.

This hurts school attendance. Of the 600 students enrolled at the school, no more than 300 attend regularly. Many students enrol in private schools or rely on places like Career Plan Coaching Centre.

The board on a road passing through Geetwas village advertises the services of Career Plan Coaching Centre.

When the state fails, who steps in?

Coaching centres like Career Plan operate in the vacuum created by the state’s inability to provide children with a good school education. This inability extends to other crucial governmental functions – like combating arsenic contamination of groundwater and containing the spread of infectious diseases like dengue. As previous stories have shown, the reasons for the state’s poor performance range from low administrative capacity and caste dynamics, to how politics is funded in Bihar.

Needless to say, this lack of performance is not unique to Bihar. Previous stories in this series have highlighted the same trend in every state we reported from – like the collapse of tax collection in Punjab and weakeninghealthcare delivery in Tamil Nadu. The decay is partly due to political neglect, partly due to the bureaucracy’s failure to handle increasingly complex problems.

What happens when the state fails? In Bihar, a motley bunch of actors – businessmen, NGOs and local strongmen – have stepped into the spaces where the state is weak.

This raises an important question: when individual actors start taking over the functions of the government, what are the outcomes?

When the market steps in

Education in one area where the market has filled the gap in government service delivery.

Bihar’s education landscape has seen a flood of entrepreneurs in recent years. They operate a wide range of establishments, from teaching institutions located in village shacks to plush air-conditioned schools.

The primary reason for this boom is profitability.

At the higher end of the education market, a school with 3,000 students, charging Rs 2,000 as monthly fees, could notch up an annual turnover of more than Rs 5 crores. At the lower end of the market, the fees fall, but so do the costs. As this news report notes, some schools operate out of rented buildings. Said Shyam Jaipuriyar, a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party in Patna, who sends his two children to a private school: “There is a saying here that if a school gets 100 students, it will make money.”

This economics has resulted in a couple of striking trends. As the previous article in this series reported, several of the new schools coming up in Bihar are owned by politicians or former bureaucrats. Politicians started entering the school business in the 1990s, said Jaipuriyar, partly to meet their need to generate cash for elections and campaigning, and partly because schools found it useful to have politicians as partners. “Instead of giving money to 10 small extortionists, it made sense to tie up with one big one and give him a share,”he said. Since then, politicians have entrenched themselves in education. Some started schools from scratch. Others, Jaipuriyar said, “became franchisees of national school chains like Zee’s Mount Litera”.

Coaching classes operate at the other end of this spectrum. Amitava Kumar writes about their ubiquity in his book about Patna, A Matter of Rats: “There were entire streets taken over by hoardings announcing such classes.”

Hoarding of coaching centres take over a street in Bhagalpur.

Shashi Bhushan, a senior reporter with Dainik Bhaskar, said their numbers started to rise from 2005. He gave three reasons for their growth. First, the quality of teachers in the government system fell. Second, parents’ incomes rose and they could afford to pay more. Third, they offered employment to young people who were unable to find jobs. Gautam Kumar, who founded Career Coaching Centre in Geetwas, had a BSc degree in mathematics. After he failed an exam for a junior government post, he turned into an education entrepreneur.

When NGOs take charge

Like education, Bihar’s health sector has also seen the mushrooming of entrepreneurs running private hospitals and clinics. But higher-end functions that traditionally fall upon the state health department – like disease surveillance, immunisation and disease eradication – are now being handled by NGOs and others.

Take the World Health Organisation. Around 1995, when its global campaign against polio was underway, the international agency, concerned at the poor state of health administration in many Indian states, decided to manage India’s polio eradication programme on its own. District-level offices were set up across the country.

The agency, said a WHO official in Bihar who spoke on the condition of anonymity, began pulling back from most states around 2009 as polio cases started to fall. But it decided to stay engaged in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Odisha. When the polio programme tapered, it expanded its focus elsewhere. “From 2013 onwards, we looked also at kala azar and immunisation,” said the official. “From January 2017 onwards, we have begun focusing on what we call neglected tropical diseases” or communicable diseases which are prevalent in tropical and sub-tropical parts of the earth.

Like the WHO, the Union government’s Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme is also tracking Bihar’s disease burden. When they first came here in 2009, said a senior epidemiologist in the team, they found the state was not collecting health data. “For diseases like measles, diptheria, chickenpox, acute diarrhoea and tetanus, there was no data at all,” he said. “No cases of dengue or chikangunya were reported to us.” The programme started collecting its own data from 2009, trying to put together a health profile of Bihar. “Disease surveillance is the backbone of disease prevention,” said the epidemiologist.

In the last 15 years, Bihar has also seen a spike in the number of NGOs working on healthcare delivery. Some of these are trying to improve the state’s performance on specific fronts. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for instance, is focusing on reducing the infant mortality rate, maternal mortality rate, fertility and malnourishment, said Sridhar, the technical director of NGO Care-India’s healthcare work in Bihar, who works with the Foundation in the state.

Other international NGOs like Engender and Japiego, said Shakeel Ur Rahman, who runs a non-profit clinic in Patna, are working on family planning and population stabilisation. Yet others are trying to figure out answers to the state’s healthcare problems. World Health Partners, for instance, is running pilot projects in Patna and nearby areas that use private sector services to reduce fatalities – a social franchise model for healthcare.

The strongmen move in

In his book When Crime Pays, academic Milan Vaishnav talks about Anant Kumar Singh, the leader from the Bhumihar caste in Mokama near Patna. Singh is a bahubali leader or local strongman. Despite the many criminal cases against him, he keeps returning to power from his borough of Mokama in central Bihar. Why do the voters there vote him back?

As Virendra, a local reporter in Mokama said, government functioning is weak in Mokama. When people go to Singh, he gets their work done. “Is aadmi ke naam ke bhay se afsar kaam karte hain. Kayi baar unhoney peeta bhi hain.” Officials do the work he tells them to. In the past, he has beaten up those who did not follow what he said.

Bahubalis serve two main purposes. They step in to perform some of the functions the state government should – from resolving small disputes and ensuring that the administration listens to the locals. Second, they ensure their caste or region gets the resources it wants to stay locally dominant. These are not abstract battles. As academic Jeffrey Witsoe writes in Democracy Against Development, a strong territorial undertone runs through the electoral politics of politicians who claim to be caste leaders. In Bihar, as he writes, local groups are struggling to gain control over local resources – “agricultural fields, roads, marketplaces, polling booths or any other place with economic, political or social importance”. He added: “That is another reason why people like Singh get voted in – they can ensure caste-group control over these spaces.”

Agrees Vaishnav, “In contexts where the rule of law is weakly enforced and social divisions are rampant, a candidate’s criminal reputation could be perceived as an asset. In the rough-and-tumble of electoral politics, where there is a dynamic pattern of competition between rival social groups, voters just might value politicians who are willing to engage in extralegal tactics to protect the status of their community.”

Unsatisfactory outcomes

How are each of these players shaping Bihar?

Start with the market. It is limited in scope since it looks for profits. It finds education attractive, but not garbage disposal, as the piles of rotting waste in the towns and cities of Bihar show.

The towns and cities of Bihar have piles of rotting garbage.

Even in education, the market delivers uneven results. At the lower end of the education boom, the quality of teaching in the coaching centres looks uncertain.Operating in an unregulated space, a couple of unemployed graduates have taken the place of government teachers.

At the higher end, where schools follow accredited syllabus, parents complain about high fees. Jaipuriyar, the BJP member, said he spends half of his monthly income – Rs 20,000 – on school and transport fees for his two children. “We manage because we live together as a large family,” he said.

Market interventions in healthcare are similarly prohibitively priced for most residents of the state. In this story on arsenic poisoning, Dr Ashok Ghosh, who heads research at the Mahavir Cancer Sansthan, explained what happens to the poor who cannot access charitable institutions – they simply die. Private hospitals are beyond their grasp.

Health NGOs are an imperfect replacement as well. They come with their own capabilities, priorities and organisational constraints. They focus on certain metrics – for instance, the infant mortality rate – rather than wider improvements in community health. Their reach is also limited to some geographical pockets.

As for the strongmen, in their quest to protect caste interests, they end up skewing access to government support and control over local resources in favour of a small number of people. In addition, the rule they establish can be often majoritarian. Often, their constituencies have the worst indices for development. Take Siwan, the stronghold of Shahabuddin, RJD leader and bahubali. It has just one one government doctor for 100,000 people – the worst ratio in all of Bihar.

It is this matrix of state failure and imperfect alternatives which shapes everyday life in Bihar.

All photos by M Rajshekhar.

This is the third and final part of a series on the failure of governance in Bihar. Read the first part here and the second part here.Read the other parts of the Ear to the Ground project here.

Ten awesome TV shows to get over your post-GoT blues

With those withdrawal symptoms kicking in, all you need is a good rebound show.

Hangovers tend to have a debilitating effect on various human faculties, but a timely cure can ease that hollow feeling generally felt in the pit of the stomach. The Game of Thrones Season 7 finale has left us with that similar empty feeling, worsened by an official statement on the 16-month-long wait to witness The Great War. That indeed is a long time away from our friends Dany, Jon, Queen C and even sweet, sweet Podrick. While nothing can quite replace the frosty thrill of Game of Thrones, here’s a list of awesome shows, several having won multiple Emmy awards, that are sure to vanquish those nasty withdrawal symptoms:

1. Billions

There is no better setting for high stakes white collar crime than the Big Apple. And featuring a suited-up Paul Giamatti going head-to-head with the rich and ruthless Damien Lewis in New York, what’s not to like? Only two seasons young, this ShowTime original series promises a wolf-of-wall-street style showcase of power, corruption and untold riches. Billions is a great high-octane drama option if you want to keep the momentum going post GoT.

2. Westworld

What do you get when the makers of the Dark Knight Trilogy and the studio behind Game of Thrones collaborate to remake a Michael Crichton classic? Westworld brings together two worlds: an imagined future and the old American West, with cowboys, gun slingers - the works. This sci-fi series manages to hold on to a dark secret by wrapping it with the excitement and adventure of the wild west. Once the plot is unwrapped, the secret reveals itself as a genius interpretation of human nature and what it means to be human. Regardless of what headspace you’re in, this Emmy-nominated series will absorb you in its expansive and futuristic world. If you don’t find all of the above compelling enough, you may want to watch Westworld simply because George RR Martin himself recommends it! Westworld will return for season 2 in the spring of 2018.

3. Big Little Lies

It’s a distinct possibility that your first impressions of this show, whether you form those from the trailer or opening sequence, will make you think this is just another sun-kissed and glossy Californian drama. Until, the dark theme of BLL descends like an eerie mist, that is. With the serious acting chops of Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman as leads, this murder mystery is one of a kind. Adapted from author Liane Moriarty’s book, this female-led show has received accolades for shattering the one-dimensional portrayal of women on TV. Despite the stellar star cast, this Emmy-nominated show wasn’t easy to make. You should watch Big Little Lies if only for Reese Witherspoon’s long struggle to get it off the ground.

4. The Night of

The Night Of is one of the few crime dramas featuring South Asians without resorting to tired stereotypes. It’s the kind of show that will keep you in its grip with its mysterious plotline, have you rooting for its characters and leave you devastated and furious. While the narrative revolves around a murder and the mystery that surrounds it, its undertones raises questions on racial, class and courtroom politics. If you’re a fan of True Detective or Law & Order and are looking for something serious and thoughtful, look no further than this series of critical acclaim.

5. American Horror Story

As the name suggests, AHS is a horror anthology for those who can stomach some gore and more. In its 6 seasons, the show has covered a wide range of horror settings like a murder house, freak shows, asylums etc. and the latest season is set to explore cults. Fans of Sarah Paulson and Jessica Lange are in for a treat, as are Lady Gaga’s fans. If you pride yourself on not being weak of the heart, give American Horror Story a try.

6. Empire

At its heart, Empire is a simple show about a family business. It just so happens that this family business is a bit different from the sort you are probably accustomed to, because this business entails running a record label, managing artistes and when push comes to shove, dealing with rivals in a permanent sort of manner. Empire treads some unique ground as a fairly violent show that also happens to be a musical. Lead actors Taraji P Henson and Terrence Howard certainly make it worth your while to visit this universe, but it’s the constantly evolving interpersonal relations and bevy of cameo appearances that’ll make you stay. If you’re a fan of hip hop, you’ll enjoy a peek into the world that makes it happen. Hey, even if you aren’t one, you might just grow fond of rap and hip hop.

7. Modern Family

When everything else fails, it’s comforting to know that the family will always be there to lift your spirits and keep you chuckling. And by the family we mean the Dunphys, Pritchetts and Tuckers, obviously. Modern Family portrays the hues of familial bonds with an honesty that most family shows would gloss over. Eight seasons in, the show’s characters like Gloria and Phil Dunphy have taken on legendary proportions in their fans’ minds as they navigate their relationships with relentless bumbling humour. If you’re tired of irritating one-liners or shows that try too hard, a Modern Family marathon is in order. This multiple-Emmy-winning sitcom is worth revisiting, especially since the brand new season 9 premiers on 28th September 2017.

8. The Deuce

Headlined by James Franco and Maggi Gyllenhaal, The Deuce is not just about the dazzle of the 1970s, with the hippest New York crowd dancing to disco in gloriously flamboyant outfits. What it IS about is the city’s nooks and crannies that contain its underbelly thriving on a drug epidemic. The series portrays the harsh reality of New York city in the 70s following the legalisation of the porn industry intertwined with the turbulence caused by mob violence. You’ll be hooked if you are a fan of The Wire and American Hustle, but keep in mind it’s grimmer and grittier. The Deuce offers a turbulent ride which will leave you wanting more.

9. Dexter

In case you’re feeling vengeful, you can always get the spite out of your system vicariously by watching Dexter, our favourite serial killer. This vigilante killer doesn’t hide behind a mask or a costume, but sneaks around like a criminal, targeting the bad guys that have slipped through the justice system. From its premier in 2006 to its series finale in 2013, the Emmy-nominated Michael C Hall, as Dexter, has kept fans in awe of the scientific precision in which he conducts his kills. For those who haven’t seen the show, the opening credits give an accurate glimpse of how captivating the next 45 minutes will be. If it’s been a while since you watched in awe as the opening credits rolled, maybe you should revisit the world’s most loved psychopath for nostalgia’s sake.

Available starting October

10. Rome

If you’re still craving an epic drama with extensive settings and a grandiose plot and sub-plots, Rome, co-produced by HBO and BBC, is where your search stops. Rome is a historical drama that takes you through an overwhelming journey of Ancient Rome’s transition from a republic to an empire. And when it comes to tastes, this series provides the similar full-bodied flavour that you’ve grown to love about Game of Thrones. There’s a lot to take away for those who grew up quoting Julius Caesar, and for those looking for a realistic depiction of the legendary gladiators. If you’re a history buff, give this Emmy-winning show a try.

For your next obsession, Hotstar Premium has you covered with its wide collection of the most watched shows in the world. Apart from the ones we’ve recommended, Indian viewers can now easily watch other universally loved shows such as Silicon Valley and Prison Break, and movies including all titles from the Marvel and Disney universe. So take control of your life again post the Game of Thrones gloom and sign up for the Hotstar Premium membership here.

This article was produced by the Scroll marketing team on behalf of Hotstar and not by the Scroll editorial team.